Y this morning. The letter is a direct derivation of the Greek upsilon, which in turn comes from the Phoenician waw. As a side note, Y was seen by early English printers (presumably due to its similarity of form in blackletter script) as a suitable replacement sort for Thorn, Þ. This resulted in the ‘Ye Olde Ribbon Shoppe’ phenomenon, which has led some to believe that people actually talked like that. ‘Ye this; Ye that,’ They didn’t. They said ‘The’, same as us. Thorn was later thrown out of the English alphabet in preference of Th.